site update / Archival Interviews: Autechre, Spring Heel Jack, Photek, Tilliander, Dub Assassin

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Re-uploaded six additional archival interviews I’ve done, dating back to 1995. Here they are in something approximating alphabetical order:

  • Autechre‘s Sean Booth (circa Chiastic Slide and Cichlisuite) on architecture and technology, 1997 (“More Songs About Buildings”)
  • Dub Assassin on learning from Bob Marley’s own deck-hands, 1999 (“Straight Outta Chapel Hill”)
  • Photek on DJing and remixing, 1998 (“Smile for the Camera”)
  • Spring Heel Jack‘s John Coxon and Ashley Wales (circa 68 Million Shades……) on their roots in dub and jazz, 1997 (“Low Sparks”)
  • Skylab‘s Matt Ducasse (circa #1) on working with his international bandmates (Howie B, Toshio Nakanishi, and Kudo) and learning to appreciate exotica, 1995 (“Ground Control”)
  • Andreas Tilliander on the Clicks & Cuts series and electronica’s hip-hop soul, 2002 (“Click It”)

Quote of the Week: God’s Tone

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From an obituary of Joybubbles, born Josef Engressia (May 25, 1949 — August 8, 2007), the “original granddaddy phone phreak”:

Someday there will be no need of the dial tone, and for a few of us it will be as if the voice of God has gone dead.

Written by Elizabeth McCracken: “Dial-Phone Phreak” (nytimes.com).

Haunting Screwtape MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is beauty in decay. The beauty in destruction is more complicated, ethically and artistically. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s all-too-timely comments about the spectacle that was the destruction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan on 9/11 haunted him right up through, and will no doubt long past, his recent obituaries. In “Requiem for a Dead Church,” a musician who goes by the name Screwtape has forged a sonic consideration of a church in Moonee Ponds, Australia, that was destroyed back in 2004. The destruction occurred in an arson attributed to a drunk fan of black metal.

Writes Screwtape, “One can lament the destruction of a building that has community value even if the community is not one’s own. One can also admire the beauty of its present form, forlorn, forgotten, fenced off, charred, blackened and ruined yet still retaining a sense of past dignity.” The sound in “Requiem for a Dead Church” (MP3, mp3.com.au) allies itself with both those interpretations of the church’s fate. The nearly 10-minute track can most easily be imagined to be a rendering of the haunting of the space: phantasmal voices slurring by, the portal to another realm symbolized by ruptured textures that signify liminality, trespass and dread. The sorrow and sense of loss are unmistakable, but one listens just as much for the care taken with, and the resulting beauty of, the sonic transformations.

Leafcutter John Folk-tronic MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One man’s hard-drive-cleaning is another’s hard-drive-filling. Well, maybe not “filling,” but a solid 3.16 megabytes that might never had been heard widely had Leafcutter John (born John Burton) not decided to clean out his computer in advance of recording a new album. From the digital back pages came a three-and-half-minute track that starks in static and whir, veers into olde-timey songcraft, and then fades back into the electronic ether (MP3).

John explains: “Also while foraging around old hard-drives found this which is a kind of glitchy atmospheric demo version of the ”˜this is the right way’ bit of ”˜Go Back’ from my 2006 album ”˜The Forest and the Sea’.” More info at leafcutterjohn.com, along with four additional, more song-oriented tracks.

Willits + Sakamoto Duet MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits has posted a track from the album Ocean Fire, a collaboration with Japanese legend Ryuichi Sakamoto (Yellow Magic Orchestra; Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence). The track, “Toward Water” (MP3), is more ornery than one might expect from either musician. It has neither Willits’s penchant for spry randomness, nor Sakamoto’s for melody. It’s a deep, wavering drone with occasional highlights in the treble end, but a much more constant underlying bass end, like something slowly twisting in the dark. The album was released Commmons/Avex (commmons.com) in Japan in October 2007, and will be released this month in the United States on 12k (12k.com). The cover of the 12k version appears to the left. More info at Willits’s website, christopherwillits.com.